Nokia Winds Down Ozo high-end virtual reality cameras

The Ozo and
its follow-up the Ozo+ had been marketed to professionals as being able to
capture the "highest quality" 360-degree footage possible, and had
been used by Disney among others.

But despite
a recent price cut, the Finnish firm indicated that sales had been weaker than
expected.

One expert
said it reflected the fact that public appetite for VR content was still very
limited.

In a
statement, Nokia said it now planned to dedicate its efforts to developing
smart health products instead, and would leave it to others to build on its
work in VR.

"The
slower-than-expected development of the VR market means that Nokia Technologies
plans to reduce investments and focus more on technology licensing
opportunities," it said.

"The
unit aims to halt development of further versions of the Ozo camera and hardware,
while maintaining commitments to existing customers."

The camera's
price restricted its audience almost solely to professionals

It added
that 310 jobs were being cut as a consequence, affecting posts in Finland, the
UK and US.

The original
Ozo was first unveiled in July 2015. The handheld device featured eight cameras
and the same number of microphones in order to capture both spherical video and
spatial sound.

It initially
had a $60,000 (£45,500) price tag, bringing it in line with the kind of other
cameras commonly used for Hollywood movies and TV commercials.

Disney was
one of the early adopters, using the equipment to create interactive
behind-the-scenes footage for its Jungle Book film.

It was also
used by London-based production house Alchemy VR for a forthcoming natural
history documentary about the Galapagos Islands. The company's head of
production welcomed the possibilities that its relatively small size opened up.

Nokia
brought out a second-generation product earlier this year at a lower price than
the original

"The
Ozo is probably the simplest camera in the world to use," Ian Syder told
the TVTechGlobal news site.

"It's
really changed the way we do VR. Suddenly, the riskier shots are possible - you
can put it on a motorised dolly [cart], or strap it to a helicopter."

However,
others were more critical.

The UK-based
production house SpeedVR warned clients that the file sizes which the camera
created were huge, and that it struggled with scenes featuring shadows or
highlights.

"For
around a tenth of the price you can get higher quality elsewhere," it
blogged last year.

In April,
Nokia announced a follow-up system - the Ozo+ - promising better dynamic range
and sharper, cleaner images to address clients' criticisms.

The amount
of storage required and processing time involved add to the costs of using Ozo

It went on
sale for $45,000 but was discounted to $25,000 five months later.

"The
Ozo has clearly been a much smaller niche product than Nokia anticipated,"
commented Ben Wood from the CCS Insight tech consultancy.

"The
challenge was that this was extremely early stage technology and users often
found it took a long time to process the content.

"And
unfortunately, 360-degree content and virtual reality more broadly have not
taken off as quickly as many in the industry had hoped - despite the support of
platforms including Facebook and YouTube."

Over the
course of the last few years, Cloudflare built a global network of data center
locations and partnerships to expand its DDoS (Distributed Denial of service) protection,
security tools and website acceleration services.

Nigerian
music producer, Sunday Ginikachukwu Nweke, aka Masterkraft and banky w, has revealed how
R&B singer and actor, Oluwabankole Wellington, Banky W helped him in his
life before he attained stardom.

We hear from
the South by Southwest festival where the usual optimism about the potential of
tech - this after all was where Twitter took off - was replaced by anxiety
about the damage social media can cause.